Viewing Eleanor Roosevelt’s tenure as first lady through the acrid smoke of Hillary Clinton’s history as political wife, senator, secretary of state and failed presidential candidate is like trying to picture a loved one before she suffered a devastating injury: There is no way to un-see that wreckage, to reimagine her whole. But there was once a highly educated, independent American wife and mother who transformed the role of first lady, worked tirelessly for social justice and served as a strategic helpmate to her charismatic, philandering husband — while retaining her dignity, and even some measure of privacy, in that exposed position.

It was a different time.

Eleanor Roosevelt had legions of detractors as well as acolytes, of course, and yet she was awarded — by a still moderately respectful press and not least by Franklin D. Roosevelt himself — a measure of personal freedom to nurture close emotional ties with others. One of the most significant of these was the A.P. journalist Lorena Hickok (known as Hick), who left her job after becoming too close to her subject, worked for the Roosevelt administration and later lived at the White House. In July 1933, just a few months after her husband took office, Eleanor and Hick set out for a vacation in New England and Canada, driving off in Eleanor’s sporty blue convertible, unaccompanied by the Secret Service, staying together in hotels and farmhouses. Today it’s unthinkable that such a holiday could go undocumented — or unpunished.

The couple’s jaunty trip in Eleanor’s Buick roadster is a central episode in two new novels that remarkably (and no doubt teeth-gnashingly, for their authors) have seized on the same ploy: to chronicle this daring relationship from Lorena Hickok’s point of view, in her wiseguy reporter’s voice. The psychologically astute storyteller Amy Bloom and the adept historical novelist Kelly O’Connor McNees could hardly be more different as writers; consequently, their books occupy distinct territories. Bloom’s lyrical novel, laced with her characteristic wit and wisdom, celebrates love in its fiery and also embered phases, while McNees’s more politically detailed fiction has Hick’s ultimate solitude, and her disappointment, at its heart.

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CreditFranklin D. Roosevelt Library

In “White Houses,” Bloom weaves back and forth between April 1945, shortly after Franklin Roosevelt’s death, and the early 1930s, telling the textured story of a physical passion and spiritual kinship between two middle-aged women that endures through Eleanor’s 12 years as the president’s wife. Bloom’s prologue sketches the women’s New England trip as their “golden time,” days filled with laughter, sex and poetry: “We had new love and this beautiful country, reckless and wide. … We glided from place to place, in love, in rapture, enjoying each day, all day.” Yet in detail this is no soft-focused Sapphic interlude; it’s a wry account of two smart, discreet women navigating the risk of public intrusions — “Sometimes people recognized her, and … I’d back away … so she could sip the lemonade or the cider, and admire the children or the goats or the quilts” — with the particular burden that one of them is the first lady.

“White Houses” is scattered with colorful period references — to, say, the Lindbergh baby’s kidnapping (covered for The A.P. by Hick) and Wallis Simpson (“famous for kissing up, and kicking down”) — but Bloom employs her research with a light touch. Her narrative is suffused with a vivid sense of the personalities of both Roosevelts, their charms and their arrogance, the loyalty they commanded (“a devotion that makes sex look like a short swim in a shallow pool”). Hick sees through Franklin’s manipulations, yet is in awe of him nevertheless. Bloom draws an emotionally convincing picture of this complex domestic tangle. Far from being Franklin’s rival, Hick is an enabler and an ally, turning in reports from across the nation on the impact of the Depression and helping Franklin manage at least one of his mistresses, Missy LeHand, after she suffers a stroke.

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McNees’s “Undiscovered Country” unfolds more straightforwardly and in a narrower time frame, opening with Hick interviewing the candidate’s wife in the fall of 1932 and with its final chapter closing at the end of 1933. McNees takes us through the women’s headiest romantic period, going to the opera and enjoying evenings in Hick’s Manhattan apartment, where one night she gives Eleanor a sapphire ring and they vow to live together one day. (The ring was a real gift Lorena made to Eleanor; Bloom also refers to it, though she imagines the scene taking place at the White House.) After Franklin Roosevelt assumes office, Hick’s work changes, and McNees devotes several detailed chapters to her reporting on the terrible poverty in West Virginia. Eleanor’s increasing absorption with political life causes Hick’s resentment to build, however, and from this point on the novel’s emotional pull is downward. “This is bigger than us,” Hick is told, as Eleanor urges their separation for the greater good. By the end, McNees has consigned Hick to the familiar role of the lonely lesbian, thwarted and excluded by the straight world.

This is a shame, since much in McNees’s characterization of Hick is lively. She’s good, for example, on Hick’s smoking and knocking back of bourbon. In early scenes, there’s a nice hint of “His Girl Friday” in the newsroom banter. And McNees, like Bloom, describes Hick’s hardscrabble past in South Dakota, her rape by her father and escape into independence as a young teenager, and how her work as a reporter saved her. (“My job was the only thing between the past and me. It was the moat that kept me safe.”) Hick’s love for Eleanor crossed lines not just of marriage and convention but also of class, and both writers are alert to Hick’s navigation of financial matters with someone who has never given them a second thought. (One of Eleanor’s gifts to Hick was a new Chevrolet, christened Bluette.) Bloom’s Hick has innate sympathy for the White House staff: “I have to laugh at my inner hired girl, always looking for a soft moment with The Family.”

Both novels celebrate an Eleanor Roosevelt who is warm and affectionate, not some humorless do-gooder, and acknowledge their debt to Blanche Wiesen Cook’s magisterial three-volume biography of the first lady. McNees points out tartly in an author’s note that although “gallons of ink have spilled probing the lives of F.D.R.’s mistresses,” Hick’s central role for Eleanor has largely been eclipsed. These two novels redress that balance, showing how a loving female companionship sustained Eleanor Roosevelt in her public and private life. She could not have been “Eleanor everywhere,” tolerating Franklin’s wanderings, if she hadn’t had Hick somewhere for herself.

Bloom’s gift to Lorena Hickok is to shine not just light but also laughter on this neglected figure, highlighting the two women’s shared humor, including acknowledgment of their famously unfeminine appearance. (“Eleanor and I were not conventional beauties. That’s what we’d say and we’d laugh, to underscore conventional, as if maybe we were some other kind.”) Bloom’s decision to set many of her novel’s framing sections in April 1945 is masterly because it allows her Hick to look back on the two women’s early “golden time” while also providing the special solace only a former lover can offer in a period of crisis. Hick comforts Eleanor not just for the loss of Franklin but for the revelation that his mistress was with him at the end. Hick embraces Eleanor and lies down with her. “Oh Hick,” Eleanor says simply. “If you don’t hold me, I will die.” In Bloom’s eloquent telling, the love these two women had for each other mattered, and lasted, in a significant way. As Hick puts it, “Eleanor’s body is the landscape of my true home.”

Sylvia Brownrigg’s most recent novel, “Pages for Her,” will be released in paperback in July.